Challenge 416 Response

“Clear Sailing”

by Oonah V. Joslin

How does the poem rise above the level of a paean to bottled water? What do the references to Wales and Mars tell us?

“Clear Sailing” is ostensibly about water but it is also a journey poem and those two themes juxtaposed make it a poem about life. The water in the poem starts with potential:

odourless tasteless
can be any shape

But its path is directed from the start and it gets further and further away from source; gets bottled, transported, does not follow its natural journey to the sea. The same is apparently true for the author, who is not Welsh but feels partly Welsh:

four hundred miles away I buy
a bottle of Brecon water
that part of me
that still feels Welsh

It and maybe she, becomes more and more alienated, finding itself “futile on the red dustscape” and threatened. But in the end the journey is one way and...

you must give your all
since you cannot make a future of the past

Is the message of the poem. In a sense, no use crying over spilt milk...water.

How does the poem rise above the level of a paean to bottled water?

Stanza 3 is perhaps the most obvious tribute to water but it mixes science...

hydrogen oxygen calcium
we are so similarly
elemental

with languages: “eau if I knew” and religious imagery, too: “hear your language as more than a babble”; as if every discipline might be brought together and understood through understanding water. It is a kind of attempt at a grand unified theory but not in order to understand the universe; rather, to understand the self:

I might learn from you
the value of me

This for me takes the poem deeper and in the very verse that is most like a eulogy.

Would standard punctuation help or distract the reader?

The problem of punctuation for any poem is whether of not it fits. In the case of this poem it doesn’t fit because the poem does not have standard grammar. It is meant to flow, like water, thought to thought, taking the reader on their own course through the poem and allowing meanings to merge:

its never still surface
tension quivering
vibration shimmering
speeds flows washes
outward from rigid confinement
ergonomic mould

If you punctuate this it ruins the quickness of it, the bubbling-up water sounds of all those ‘s’s. “ergonomic mould” stops that sequence quite naturally because it interrupts the flow and so a full stop is not required either. Standard punctuation has no place to go here.

However, the four sections are like stages in life, rites of passage:

Potential — like a child Assimilation — a sense of belonging Connection — appreciation of the other, like falling in love Acceptance — rather like middle-age

The stanzas themselves are periods throughout the poem, allowing the reader to discern where each thought ends. This was achieved by reading the poem aloud. (Most things can be achieved by reading anything aloud even if there is only oneself to hear.)

The line breaks serve to emphasise certain thoughts:

hydrogen oxygen calcium
we are so similarly
elemental

In this short thought bite, the reader has to pause slightly before “elemental” and see that link between water and a human being and all that there is. And in the final stanza there is isolation, a sense of being lost and confused. Standard punctuation would ruin those disturbing whisperings.

homesick perhaps for ocean Earth
this surface would
collapse your outer shell
would suck you dry

Line breaks and stanza breaks are placed deliberately; they are not simply there to make up for the lack of standard punctuation, they are where they are because the structure adds meaning to the poem.